According to the WCI’s most updated numbers, coal still represents a full quarter of the world’s energy consumption + for world electricity consumption, the share is 40% + more than half of America’s electricity comes from coal + in China and Australia, the totals are closer to 80% + in Poland and South Africa, the totals are over 90% + at the end of the day we’re all coal addicts + most of us just don’t realize it + right now, I think coal is the hottest commodity.
Useful links:
www.worldcoal.org
www.fossil.energy.gov
www.futuregenalliance.org
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Random Thoughts
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
- Maurice Chevalier (Actor and singer)
- Maurice Chevalier (Actor and singer)
Diamond-encrusted Hot Wheel Car
Here is what the Mattel website has to say about the diamond-encrusted car:
Hot Wheels® today announced its year-long plans to celebrate the brand's 40-year heritage at the 105th American International Toy Fair®. Anniversary activities were kicked off with the unveiling of a custom jeweled 1:64-scale Hot Wheels® car, designed by celebrity jeweler Jason of Beverly Hills. This one-of-a-kind car, the most expensive in Hot Wheels® history, was made to commemorate the production of the 4 billionth Hot Wheels® vehicle. The diamonds on the custom-made jeweled car, valued at $140,000, totals more than 2,700 and weighs nearly 23 carats. The car is cast in 18-karat white gold with the majority of the vehicle detailed with micro pave-set brilliant blue diamonds, mimicking the Hot Wheels® Spectraflame® blue paint. Under the functional hood, the engine showcases additional micro pave-set white and black diamonds. The Hot Wheels® flame logo found on the underbelly of the car is lined with white and black diamonds. Red rubies are set as the tail lights, while black diamonds and red enamel create the "red line" tires. The custom-made case that houses the jewel-encrusted vehicle also holds 40 individual white diamonds, signifying each year in the legacy of Hot Wheels®.
I really liked it.
Useful links:
www.mattel.com
www.hotwheels.com
Hot Wheels® today announced its year-long plans to celebrate the brand's 40-year heritage at the 105th American International Toy Fair®. Anniversary activities were kicked off with the unveiling of a custom jeweled 1:64-scale Hot Wheels® car, designed by celebrity jeweler Jason of Beverly Hills. This one-of-a-kind car, the most expensive in Hot Wheels® history, was made to commemorate the production of the 4 billionth Hot Wheels® vehicle. The diamonds on the custom-made jeweled car, valued at $140,000, totals more than 2,700 and weighs nearly 23 carats. The car is cast in 18-karat white gold with the majority of the vehicle detailed with micro pave-set brilliant blue diamonds, mimicking the Hot Wheels® Spectraflame® blue paint. Under the functional hood, the engine showcases additional micro pave-set white and black diamonds. The Hot Wheels® flame logo found on the underbelly of the car is lined with white and black diamonds. Red rubies are set as the tail lights, while black diamonds and red enamel create the "red line" tires. The custom-made case that houses the jewel-encrusted vehicle also holds 40 individual white diamonds, signifying each year in the legacy of Hot Wheels®.
I really liked it.
Useful links:
www.mattel.com
www.hotwheels.com
Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway, the iconoclastic British film-maker, will be bringing to life the hidden stories he sees in Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper, turning into a narrative that stretches from Christ's birth to his crucifixion with voice given to the thoughts of each disciple as they work out which of them will betray him + if all goes well, it's going to be one-of-a-kind movie with spectacular visual effects and educational content.
Useful link:
www.petergreenawayevents.com
Useful link:
www.petergreenawayevents.com
Vanity Fair Portraits
Vanity Fair has an impressive photographic collection + a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London will show classic images from Vanity Fair's early period + other viewpoints @ http://www.npg.org.uk/vanityfair/index.htm
I have seen a few and they are brilliant.
I have seen a few and they are brilliant.
Jewelers Of The Seventeenth Century
(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:
1. Old Jewels In New Settings
The dauntless Elizabeth, Queen of England, had died with her clothes on, refusing to relinquish her cumbersome finery even in death. Perhaps it might be possible for a lady to carry a greater load of gold and precious stones than did the regal Elizabeth but for the time being she was champion. The culminating point in the matter of quantity had been reached, and with her death in 1603 the flood tide of jewels in Europe began gradually to recede.
James I, who succeeded Elizabeth, had a wife, Anne, who loved finery but lacked that elusive quality called style. There was little change in dress and jewels in England for some years. After Queen Anne’s death, the ladies even became a degree less flamboyant—but not so the men. Jewels seem to have found a special place of prominence on their enormous felt hats. These hats were decorated extravagantly with jeweled bands and gold clasps set with gems that held in place the bunch of plumes waving jauntily from the side, back, or upturned brim.
Pearls were especially in vogue. My lady’s hair was twined with pearls and it was the acme of elegant distinction for a gentleman to wear a single large, pear-shaped pearl dangling from one ear only, the other ear left unadorned.
Meanwhile, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Europe was torn with a series of wars. In Germany, the Thirty Years’ War had left the country ruined and desolate. The highly skilled, individualistic work of the goldsmith-jeweler is not an art that thrives in time of war. Germany’s goldsmiths, if escape were possible, fled and scattered in other lands.
Along with these unsettled times came changes of fashion. In France, the heavy velvets and stiff brocades that could almost stand alone made place for dainty silks and furbelows less stately, more gay, in accordance with the temper of the French court. Out of mode were the architectural forms, scrolls, and strapwork dear to the German school. Paris called for open lace-like settings in keeping with the new delicacy of fabrics, not the massive ornaments of the century past. The gemstone itself was now called upon to play the leading role; the setting must be subordinate.
And then, as has so often happened, came a wave of remodeling jewelry. Many a fine example of the goldsmith’s art was cast without regard to its beauty into the melting pot.
The epidemic of destruction did not confine itself to France. In Merrie England, when the new king, James I, took stock of the crown jewels, the inventory of 1603 listed ‘a fayre Flower, with three great ballaces, in the myddest a greate pointed dyamonde, and three greate perles fixed, with a fayre greate perle pendante, called The Brethren.’ It was, of course, the same historic pendant made for Charles the Bold, and later added to the royal regalia by Henry VIII. Elizabeth had kept the jewel intact, but when the fever of remodeling jewelry swept Europe, the pendant was among the royal jewels handled over to one of the court jewelers, George Heriot of Edinburgh, for refashioning.
Jewlers Of The Seventeenth Century (continued)
1. Old Jewels In New Settings
The dauntless Elizabeth, Queen of England, had died with her clothes on, refusing to relinquish her cumbersome finery even in death. Perhaps it might be possible for a lady to carry a greater load of gold and precious stones than did the regal Elizabeth but for the time being she was champion. The culminating point in the matter of quantity had been reached, and with her death in 1603 the flood tide of jewels in Europe began gradually to recede.
James I, who succeeded Elizabeth, had a wife, Anne, who loved finery but lacked that elusive quality called style. There was little change in dress and jewels in England for some years. After Queen Anne’s death, the ladies even became a degree less flamboyant—but not so the men. Jewels seem to have found a special place of prominence on their enormous felt hats. These hats were decorated extravagantly with jeweled bands and gold clasps set with gems that held in place the bunch of plumes waving jauntily from the side, back, or upturned brim.
Pearls were especially in vogue. My lady’s hair was twined with pearls and it was the acme of elegant distinction for a gentleman to wear a single large, pear-shaped pearl dangling from one ear only, the other ear left unadorned.
Meanwhile, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Europe was torn with a series of wars. In Germany, the Thirty Years’ War had left the country ruined and desolate. The highly skilled, individualistic work of the goldsmith-jeweler is not an art that thrives in time of war. Germany’s goldsmiths, if escape were possible, fled and scattered in other lands.
Along with these unsettled times came changes of fashion. In France, the heavy velvets and stiff brocades that could almost stand alone made place for dainty silks and furbelows less stately, more gay, in accordance with the temper of the French court. Out of mode were the architectural forms, scrolls, and strapwork dear to the German school. Paris called for open lace-like settings in keeping with the new delicacy of fabrics, not the massive ornaments of the century past. The gemstone itself was now called upon to play the leading role; the setting must be subordinate.
And then, as has so often happened, came a wave of remodeling jewelry. Many a fine example of the goldsmith’s art was cast without regard to its beauty into the melting pot.
The epidemic of destruction did not confine itself to France. In Merrie England, when the new king, James I, took stock of the crown jewels, the inventory of 1603 listed ‘a fayre Flower, with three great ballaces, in the myddest a greate pointed dyamonde, and three greate perles fixed, with a fayre greate perle pendante, called The Brethren.’ It was, of course, the same historic pendant made for Charles the Bold, and later added to the royal regalia by Henry VIII. Elizabeth had kept the jewel intact, but when the fever of remodeling jewelry swept Europe, the pendant was among the royal jewels handled over to one of the court jewelers, George Heriot of Edinburgh, for refashioning.
Jewlers Of The Seventeenth Century (continued)
Natural Landscape
(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
The Art Of Constable, Bonington, Crome, And Cotman
1
Unquestionably the two greatest English painters of landscape, and probably the two greatest English painters of any kind, were Turner and Constable, who were born within a year of one another. Turner, as we saw in the last chapter, amassed a large fortune; Constable, on the other hand, could hardly earn a bare living, and not until 1814, when the artist was thirty eight, did he sell a picture to any but his own personal friends.
How was it that, from a worldly point of view, Constable failed where Turner succeeded? The explanation is to be found in the totally different character of the landscapes painted by these two artists. Turner, as Claude had done before him, made frequent use of nominal subjects as an excuse for his pictures of Nature; there was a dramatic element in his art which appealed to the popular imagination, and even when, as in many of his later works, people found difficulty in apprehending the elements of his style, they were insensibly affected by the splendor of his color and brought to admit that these pictures, if difficult to understand, were paintings in the ‘grand style’.
Constable never made use of ficticious subjects and titles as an excuse for painting landscapes. His works were wholly free from any dramatic or foreign interest, and following example of the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century, he whole-heartedly devoted himself to painting the simple, homely beauty of the scenery in his native land. He modestly confessed that he thought there was room for a ‘natural painter’ and by this he meant a painter who would devote himself to painting as truly as he could the beauty of Nature without importing into his pictures any extraneous reference to Homeric legend or to events in the past or present.
His landscapes were long unappreciated because they appealed to a pure love of Nature which was not fully awake in the artist’s lifetime. ‘My art,’ said Constable a little bitterly in his middle years, ‘flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, tickles nobody by petiteness, it is without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how can I then hope to be popular?’
John Constable was born on June 11, 1776, nearly fourteen months, to be precise, after the birth of Turner. He was the son of a miller who owned watermills at Flatford and Dedham and two windmills at East Berghholt in Suffolk. It was at the mill house in East Berghholt that John Constable was born, and here he passed the greater part of his youth. His father wished him to enter the Church, but Constable had no inclination in this direction, and after he had finished his education in the local school, at the age of eighteen he assisted his father in the mill at East Bergholt which figures in so many of his landscapes.
Meanwhile his love of Nature and art was encouraged by a great amateur who happened to have his seat in the neighboring county of Essex and wa quick to recognize the talent of young Constable. Sir George Beaumont (1753-1827) was something of a painter himself, he had been a pupil of Richard Wilson; and he was an enthusiastic patron of art and artists. He had peculiar ideas about color, and his well-known saying that ‘a good picture, like good fiddle, should be brown,’ was not helpful to a painter like Constable, who saw them; but at this time Constable was beginner, and the friendly encouragement and advice of Beaumont decided Constable’s career.
One of the best things about Sir George Beaumont, to whose zeal and generosity we owe in large measure the establishment of the National Gallery, was his unremitting efforts to make England appreciate the genius of her own artists. As a young man he had waggishly shown up the ignorance of the public and its ridiculous passion for foreign artists by advertising in the newspapers that a wonderful German had arrived in Bond Street who could take likenesses by a new method of heating the mirror in which the sitter looked, and for ever fixing and preserving the reflection! On the next day a crowd of fashionable folk flocked to Bond Street, only to be laughed at by the practical joker and his friends.
Natural Landscape (continued)
The Art Of Constable, Bonington, Crome, And Cotman
1
Unquestionably the two greatest English painters of landscape, and probably the two greatest English painters of any kind, were Turner and Constable, who were born within a year of one another. Turner, as we saw in the last chapter, amassed a large fortune; Constable, on the other hand, could hardly earn a bare living, and not until 1814, when the artist was thirty eight, did he sell a picture to any but his own personal friends.
How was it that, from a worldly point of view, Constable failed where Turner succeeded? The explanation is to be found in the totally different character of the landscapes painted by these two artists. Turner, as Claude had done before him, made frequent use of nominal subjects as an excuse for his pictures of Nature; there was a dramatic element in his art which appealed to the popular imagination, and even when, as in many of his later works, people found difficulty in apprehending the elements of his style, they were insensibly affected by the splendor of his color and brought to admit that these pictures, if difficult to understand, were paintings in the ‘grand style’.
Constable never made use of ficticious subjects and titles as an excuse for painting landscapes. His works were wholly free from any dramatic or foreign interest, and following example of the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century, he whole-heartedly devoted himself to painting the simple, homely beauty of the scenery in his native land. He modestly confessed that he thought there was room for a ‘natural painter’ and by this he meant a painter who would devote himself to painting as truly as he could the beauty of Nature without importing into his pictures any extraneous reference to Homeric legend or to events in the past or present.
His landscapes were long unappreciated because they appealed to a pure love of Nature which was not fully awake in the artist’s lifetime. ‘My art,’ said Constable a little bitterly in his middle years, ‘flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, tickles nobody by petiteness, it is without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how can I then hope to be popular?’
John Constable was born on June 11, 1776, nearly fourteen months, to be precise, after the birth of Turner. He was the son of a miller who owned watermills at Flatford and Dedham and two windmills at East Berghholt in Suffolk. It was at the mill house in East Berghholt that John Constable was born, and here he passed the greater part of his youth. His father wished him to enter the Church, but Constable had no inclination in this direction, and after he had finished his education in the local school, at the age of eighteen he assisted his father in the mill at East Bergholt which figures in so many of his landscapes.
Meanwhile his love of Nature and art was encouraged by a great amateur who happened to have his seat in the neighboring county of Essex and wa quick to recognize the talent of young Constable. Sir George Beaumont (1753-1827) was something of a painter himself, he had been a pupil of Richard Wilson; and he was an enthusiastic patron of art and artists. He had peculiar ideas about color, and his well-known saying that ‘a good picture, like good fiddle, should be brown,’ was not helpful to a painter like Constable, who saw them; but at this time Constable was beginner, and the friendly encouragement and advice of Beaumont decided Constable’s career.
One of the best things about Sir George Beaumont, to whose zeal and generosity we owe in large measure the establishment of the National Gallery, was his unremitting efforts to make England appreciate the genius of her own artists. As a young man he had waggishly shown up the ignorance of the public and its ridiculous passion for foreign artists by advertising in the newspapers that a wonderful German had arrived in Bond Street who could take likenesses by a new method of heating the mirror in which the sitter looked, and for ever fixing and preserving the reflection! On the next day a crowd of fashionable folk flocked to Bond Street, only to be laughed at by the practical joker and his friends.
Natural Landscape (continued)
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Heard On The Street
Remember: the market is always right + you can never be taught about market, you have to learn it + you must balance fear and greed.
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